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Mid-Day: A dialogue with Indian crafts: Maggie Baxter

by Dhara Vora Sabhnani

Contemporary Australian artist Maggie Baxter’s ongoing exhibition blurs the line between contemporary art and traditional Indian textile craft practices.

Burst, Detail, Direct block printing with mineral dye on handwoven kala cotton, with hand stitch, 95.5 x 44.5 inches, 2019. pics/Maggie Baxter and Project 88, Mumbai

What happens when a contemporary artist from Australia, who largely produces abstract work, decides to connect with block printers from Kutch who don’t speak English? In the case of artist Maggie Baxter, the answer is a solo art exhibition.

A textile artist and public art curator, Baxter has been returning to India, especially Kutch, since 1990. These visits have inspired her to create several group and solo exhibitions in the past that merge the beauty of the many embroideries and block printing styles of Kutch with her practice. Her latest show, titled Blurred Lines, pushes this conversation between cultures forward.

No-Stro-Phe, Detail, Direct block print with mineral dye on hand woven kala cotton, Ari embroidery, silk backing, 230 x 16 inches, 2018

Presented at Project 88 in collaboration with the Australian Consulate-General in Mumbai and the Government of Western Australia, Baxter began to toy with the idea of Blurred Lines on a trip to Udaipur, where she visited a shop that sold notebooks and journals. A pile of old ledgers filled with unintelligible writings got Baxter thinking as she had always been interested in the script. In fact, she had even worked on a series of photographs on graffiti walls with peeling paint during her student days in 1980.

Read the entire interview here: https://www.mid-day.com/articles/a-dialogue-with-indian-crafts/21495173